Introduction: September 11, 2001, Cultural Trauma, and Popular Culture

Abstract

The commercial airliner hijackings and crashes on September 11, 2001, confounded the traditionally dominant US narrative of the American Dream, which has persistently and pervasively featured optimism and belief in a just world that affirms and rewards self-determination. This shattering of a worldview fundamental to mainstream US experience and cultural understanding has manifested as a cultural trauma throughout popular culture in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Popular press oral histories, literary fiction, television, and film are among the multiple, ubiquitous sites evidencing preoccupations with existential crisis, vulnerability, and moral ambivalence, with fate, no-win scenarios, and anti-heroes now pervading commonly told and readily accessible stories.